by H. G. Wells
rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values
at every centre of population, the value of existing house
property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong
depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the
world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the
stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;-this was the
reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous
under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.
There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out
into Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran.
'The Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he
shouted. 'The State Railways are going to scrap all their
engines. Everything's going to be scrapped-everything. Come and
scrap the mint, you fellows, come and scrap the mint!'
In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of
America quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous
increase also in violent crime throughout the world. The thing
had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human
society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.
For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been
no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations
this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs.
The world in these days was not really governed at all, in the
sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent
years. Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic,
conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative;
throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism
still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted servant, it
was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an
enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Their
professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation
of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they
clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts,
conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize
advantages and suspicious of every generosity. Government was an
obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on
outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was
the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and
imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade
even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very
existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.
The world was so little governed that with the very coming of
plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when
everything necessary to satisfy human needs and everything
necessary to realise such will and purpose as existed then in
human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of
hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and incoherent
suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of this vast
new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there
was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible.
As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of
the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement
that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the
blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative
individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn
of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the
very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess
over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in
her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty,
the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in
her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court,
the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of
the Dass-Tata patent litigation.
There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room,
during the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading
counsel of the day argued and shouted over a miserable little
matter of more royalties or less and whether the Dass-Tata
company might not bar the Holsten-Roberts' methods of utilising
the new power. The Dass-Tata people were indeed making a
strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly in atomic
engineering. The judge, after the manner of those times, sat
raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolish
huge wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and
queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that
were held to be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean
wooden benches stirred and whispered artful-looking solicitors,
busily scribbling reporters, the parties to the case, expert
witnesses, interested people, and a jostling confusion of
subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming a style
on the most esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric
spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the free
sunlight outside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's
Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper
lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention and human
exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was
manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of
the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen
into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would-be
omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination…
Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon
as they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a
basis for further work, and to that confiding disposition and one
happy flash of adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his
claim…
But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the
new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to
the purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is
just one of innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the
face of the world festered with patent legislation. It chanced,
however, to have one oddly dramatic feature in the fact that
Holsten, after being kept waiting about the court for two days as
a beggar might have waited at a rich man's door, after being
bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was called as a
witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and told not to
'quibble' by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely
explicit.
The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at
Holsten's astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig.
Holsten was a great man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men
were put in their places.
'We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or
hasn't he?' said the judge, 'we don't want to have your views
whether Sir Philip
Dass's improvements were merely superficial
adaptations or whether they were implicit in your paper. No
doubt-after the manner of inventors-you think most things that
were ever likely to be discovered are implicit in your papers. No
doubt also you think too that most subsequent additions and
modifications are merely superficial. Inventors have a way of
thinking that. The law isn't concerned with that sort of thing.
The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law
is concerned with the question whether these patent rights have
the novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that admission
may or may not stop, and all these other things you are saying in
your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions addressed
to you-none of these things have anything whatever to do with
the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me
in this court to see how you scientific men, with all your
extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander and wander
so soon as you get into the witness-box. I know no more
unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple question
is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing
knowledge and methods in this matter or has he not? We don't
want to know whether they were large or small additions nor what
the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave to
us.'
Holsten was silent.
'Surely?' said the judge, almost pityingly.
'No, he hasn't,' said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his
life he must disregard infinitesimals.
'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel
put the question?…'
An entry in Holsten's diary-autobiography, dated five days later,
runs: 'Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this
country. It is hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. The
oldest of old bottles and this new wine, the most explosive wine.
Something will overtake them.'
Section 4
There was a certain truth in Holsten's assertion that the law was
'hundreds of years old.' It was, in relation to current thought
and widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the
material and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were
now changing still more rapidly, the law-courts and the
legislatures of the world were struggling desperately to meet
modern demands with devices and procedures, conceptions of rights
and property and authority and obligation that dated from the
rude compromises of relatively barbaric times. The horse-hair
wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, their musty courts
and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outward and visible
intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and political
organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was
indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong,
that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.
Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication
that in the field of natural science had been the beginning of
the conquest of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries preparing the spirit of the new world
within the degenerating body of the old. The idea of a greater
subordination of individual interests and established
institutions to the collective future, is traceable more and more
clearly in the literature of those times, and movement after
movement fretted itself away in criticism of and opposition to
first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley,
with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established
rulers of the world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas
and suggestions that was known as Socialism, and more
particularly its international side, feeble as it was in creative
proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses to the
growth of a conception of a modernised system of
inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
proprietary legal ideas.
The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular
writer upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the
middle of the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state,
planned as an electric-traction system is planned, without
reference to pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines, did
not take a very strong hold upon the popular imagination of the
world until the twentieth century. Then, the growing impatience
of the American people with the monstrous and socially paralysing
party systems that had sprung out of their absurd electoral
arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called the
'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the
thought of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property,
employment, education, and government, than had ever been
contemplated before. No doubt these Modern State ideas were very
largely the reflection upon social and political thought of the
vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for
two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having
no more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of
Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death
of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds, and it needed
only just such social and political stresses as the coming of the
atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptly
into crude and startling realisation.
Section 5
Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical
novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades
of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must
understand Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual
than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title,
carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a
century and a half earlier.
Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history
of his life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third
birthdays. He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant
man, but he had a trick of circumstantial writing; and though no
authentic portrait was to survive for the information of
posterity, he betrays by a score of casual phrases that he was
short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a 'rather blobby' face,
and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He belonged until the
financial debacle of 1956 to the class of fairly prosperous
people, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy and
then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air
to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany.
His family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares,
coal mines, and house property, were destroyed. Reduced to
penury, he sou
ght to earn a living. He suffered great hardship,
and was then caught up by the war and had a year of soldiering,
first as an officer in the English infantry and then in the army
of pacification. His book tells all these things so simply and
at the same time so explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an
eye by which future generations may have at least one man's
vision of the years of the Great Change.
And he was, he tells us, a 'Modern State' man 'by instinct' from
the beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and
laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long
and delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the
Thames opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such
thought was interwoven with the very fabric of that pioneer
school in the educational renascence in England. After the
customary exchange years in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into
the classical school of London University. The older so-called
'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the
most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever
wasted human life, had already been swept out of this great
institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and
Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so
that he wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an
unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilisations of
the European system to which they were the key. (This change was
still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome with an
'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and
manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and
seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation
and an impropriety when it wasn't.')
Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the
English railways and the gradual cleansing of the London
atmosphere as the smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to
electric heating. The building of laboratories at Kensington was
still in progress, and he took part in the students' riots that
delayed the removal of the Albert Memorial. He carried a banner
with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side, and on the other
'Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great Departed
Stand in the Rain?' He learnt the rather athletic aviation of